Over the past five years, the Indy Pass for skiers and snowboarders has grown as an affordable alternative to the twin titans of season passes, Epic and Ikon, featuring mostly small and medium-sized independent ski areas that leave the luxury to the megaresorts.
Indy Pass evolved without fanfare while Epic and Ikon dueled for dominance, but this year it’s adding the Loveland ski area, a move Indy Pass managing director Erik Mogensen calls one of the biggest additions to Indy Pass since its inception.
“It’s a complete game-changer,” Mogensen said.
Having begun modestly in 2019 with 34 members, Indy Pass this year will include 230 no-frills ski areas across the country, including Sunlight, Powderhorn, Howelsen Hill, Granby Ranch and Echo Mountain in Colorado. Loveland is among 52 areas being added to Indy Pass this season.
“The amount of Indy visits to Colorado is probably going to go up 300% because Loveland is on the pass, which means all these other small resorts like Echo and Sunlight are going to go up with it,” Mogensen said. “It’s a very good thing for everyone, and that’s why a win like Loveland is so important for Indy. People are a little tired and exhausted when it comes to the Ikon and Epic world.”
Related Articles
When every Colorado ski resort plans to open for the 2024-25 season
One goal of Indy Pass is to help smaller independent areas compete in the era of rampant ski resort consolidation. Broomfield-based Vail Resorts owns 42 mountain resorts worldwide. Denver-based rival Alterra Mountain Company has 18. But their partner ressorts Epic and Ikon passes include more than 130 ski areas.
“Loveland has incredible elevation, early and late season, and it has the right vibe — it’s the Indy Pass experience,” Mogensen said. “For us, Loveland is a massive win, and it’s a shot across the bow to the big guys. It’s taken us five years to crack into a major Colorado resort.”
Indy Pass aims to protect the small and medium-sized ski experience by restricting pass use to two visits at any given area and by capping the number of passes they sell. There is currently a waiting list, in fact, but the cap will be raised and passes will go on sale for those on the waiting list Oct. 24-27. A limited number of passes will go on sale to the general public beginning Oct. 28. They will cost $419.
Mogensen says raising the cap is in keeping with the Indy philosophy regarding capacity because the increase is related to the additional areas being added to the pass this year.
“We highly limit capacity,” Mogensen said. “We don’t sell an endless amount like Ikon and Epic do. We do not want to overrun resorts and ruin the very experience we’re trying to preserve.”
That’s one of the reasons Indy Pass is a “natural fit” for Loveland, according to communications and marketing director Loryn Roberson.
“It’s a way we can thoughtfully introduce new skiers and riders to the unique Loveland experience, where you get that small-resort atmosphere with big-mountain skiing and riding,” Roberson said. “With this partnership we are able to welcome visitors from across the country while still preserving those qualities that make Loveland so special.”
Mogensen, who lives in Granby, is passionate about the independent ski area experience, and has been since he was a teenager growing up in Buffalo. He loved skiing at a small area 45 minutes south of town, Ski Tamarack, until it closed in 2004. Heartbroken at age 16, he wrote a letter to the editor that was published in the Buffalo News.
“Tamarack gone! What can one say when a good thing disappears?” his three-paragraph letter began. “Words cannot do justice to the feelings of so many in Western New York … I grew up at Tamarack, taking my first turns at the age of 3. Now I teach others how to ski. I was an instructor at Tamarack for the past three years … Come December, when driving down Route 240 to Kissing Bridge (ski area), I will pass Tamarack. Each time I will remember my last run downhill on a Sunday afternoon in late March. It was great.”
Indy Pass managing director Erik Mogensen lives in Granby when he’s not trying to save a small New England ski area from extinction, which he is doing this season for a salary of $1. He calls the addition of Loveland ski area to the Indy Pass roster “a game-changer.” (Provided by Erik Mogensen)
Dozens of U.S. ski areas have closed since then. One more would have closed last year, if not for Mogensen.
A year ago, the small, family-owned Black Mountain ski area in New Hampshire was on the verge of closure. Mogensen persuaded the family to keep it open for one more season while he tried to find a buyer. He wasn’t able to secure one, but last month he announced that Indy Pass would purchase and run Black Mountain this season to improve it before turning it over to a community co-op. The historic 90-year-old ski area has three chairlifts, a platter pull, a rope tow and a J-bar.
Humble though it is, Mogensen left his home in Colorado to become Black Mountain’s general manager for this season. He will take a salary of $1. While he is there, he will not be paid by Indy Pass or Entabeni Systems, his other company which provides hardware and software technology used by independent ski areas to process sales transactions.
“We don’t want to own ski areas,” Mogensen said of Black Mountain while working on a chairlift there this week. “We want to support ski areas. In the spring we are going to turn a very well-oiled-and-operated ski area over to a community-owned co-op so the community can own the ski area indefinitely.”
That fits with the mission of Indy Pass and Entabeni (“the mountain” in Zulu), which he founded in 2015, to keep independent ski areas viable.
“There are some pretty remarkable ski experiences to be had in Colorado,” Mogensen said. “But just as remarkable is skiing at some of smaller places like Sunlight, Granby Ranch, Howelsen, Loveland, Powderhorn, Echo. I don’t think everything needs to be an Applebee’s or a Chili’s or a Walmart or a Home Depot. There’s a lot of room for these mom-and-pop operations.
“We’re so ingrained with Ikon and Epic,” he added. “There are other and different operations out there, and we want to support those options. That’s what Indy Pass does.”